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Sunday, 27 August 2017

Afghanistan? Patrick Mercer? Forget It

The desperation of some within the Murdoch mafia to shill for Combover Crybaby Donald Trump knows no bounds: as the 45th President of the United States sinks deeper into a mire mostly of his own making at home, the Super Soaraway Currant Bun is prepared to scrape the barrel in no style at all in its efforts to curry favour with someone who may well be out of office before the year is out. And it’s a favourite Murdoch subject.

Patrick Mercer - rumbled again

Yes, it’s the idea of cheering on wars that someone else has to pay for, a idea that Creepy Uncle Rupe has been peddling for decades. But this time he and his grovelling acolytes in the Baby Shard bunker have come unstuck, as they are cheering on a war very few in the UK care about - Afghanistan - and have used a discredited former MP to shill for it. Step forward Patrick Mercer, who left Parliament in 2014, and in disgrace.

As the BBC reported at the time, “MP Patrick Mercer has resigned the Tory whip to ‘save my party embarrassment’ after claims by the BBC's Panorama that he broke Parliament's lobbying rules … It is alleged he accepted £4,000 to lobby for business interests in Fiji … Mr Mercer said he was taking legal advice and had referred himself to Parliament's standards commissioner … The Newark MP said he took the money for consultancy work outside parliament. He added he would not be standing at the next general election”.

He didn’t get to that next General Election. But now there he is in the Sun, pontificating “DONALD TRUMP is right to send troops back into Afghanistan … While critics and intolerant ‘liberals’ mock his U-turn, he has been statesmanlike and brave to change course … The threat from Afghanistan is severe and getting worse by the day”.

Then we get to the nub of Mercer’s argument: there are, he claims, an “estimated 120 ­Pakistani nuclear weapons kept at a dozen or more sites close to the Afghan border, in the middle of Taliban country … That is what British, US and other Nato countries’ troops have died for … It was never really about control of the poppy crop, more schools, equal rights for Afghan women or other placebos - it was simply nuclear-tipped ­realpolitik”.

Of course it was, and that’s why no-one used the argument for all those years we were in Afghanistan. This is complete bullshit. And it is coming from a technophobe who paraded himself in front of New Scotland Yard with a load of CDs and declared himself dissatisfied with the Police’s stance on counter-terrorism. Unfortunately, he was accompanied in this exhibition by an amateur shyster called Dominic Wightman.

Wightman and his side-kick Glen Jenvey had conned Mercer something rotten. Worse, the then MP had been warned about his new pals, but disregarded the warning. Patrick Mercer may have been a soldier; he was also appallingly gullible. So it has proved again: a fat paycheque has been waved in his face, and in exchange he has been prepared to sing the praises of someone totally unfit for the office of The President of the USA.

Our Government has plenty on its plate without listening to Rupert Murdoch’s cheerleading for the Combover Crybaby. Ignore Mercer’s mercenary bleating. And Don’t Buy The Sun.